Recent posts by Diadem on Kongregate

I’m happy to report that it is possible to defeat the entire game without using escape wings once. It’s not easy though, would be a nice badge challenge.

Strategy:
- Always kill every monster on the level. Even if it takes some potions. You need the experience, and drops.
- Always explore the entire level. Don’t miss the two secret rooms every 10 levels.
- Always pick def for level-ups and power-ups.
- Get the def and exp bonusses in the skill tree first.
- Get heal around around level 20-30. You won’t have mana to heal before then anyway, and def is too important to ignore early on.
- Get enchant only much later. Around level 50-60. If you are really hardcore and don’t want a fall-back plan, then feel free to ignore enchant entirely.
- Get the very first ‘potion efficiency’ bonus (it helps some enchants). Don’t go further into that tree.
- Once you have most of the right tree, get the good stuff from the upper tree. Don’t bother with spells, but magic, health and mp are all nice. I did get revealer eventually, but it is purely convenience, and not strictly necessary, since you should be exploring each level entirely anyway.

The goal is not to kill stuff quickly, but to make sure stuff doesn’t hurt you. For this you need a lot of defense, and a lot of elemental defense. In later levels monsters will start doing a lot of elemental damage. So keep a lot of gear around, and use enchant a lot. You want several pieces of gear for each slot, enchanted with different bonuses. You are interested in defense, all types of elemental defense, and mana regen. All the rest is less important. Always mouse over enemies before you engage them, and check what type of damage they do. Both defense and elemental defense is directly subtracted from enemy damage. So if your enemy is a forest spirit (210 damage, 30 earth, 30 light) and you have 290 armor, 40 earth and 25 light, it will 25 damage per hit. Don’t be afraid to swap gear around when you meet a new enemy.

The hardest levels are 65-75. These levels I pretty much had to swap gear around for every single enemy, and I used a lot of potions (which luckily I had been saving up for the entire game). The most annoying enemy in the entire game is the wisp, which has 5 normal attack, but 20 ice, 40 wind and 40 light. You can’t enchant wind defense, so it is basically impossible to get a decent wind resistance.

For me the game started getting easier again at level 75. You start finding some really good gear, and you can enchant stuff at level 75. Also wisps eventually disappear, and the last few enemy types aren’t too tough. The final boss isn’t very hard. He hits with a random elemental type, so basically impossible to block entirely. But you can just keep chucking potions (either health or mana followed by heal). You should have plenty. It’s also a good idea though to brew a nice stat enhancing potion just before the final battle. Potions last for only 1 battle, but that’s enough for the final boss fight. I boosted myself 10 attack and 6 decimate, which helped a lot. I’m not sure if you can use multiple potions at the same time (I guess I should try that). If that’s possible you can make the boss fight entirely trivial.

I’m not completely bored yet, but getting there. Those last 3 zone achievements were all I really wanted to get, but they’re insanely out of reach unless you want to cheat. I’ve been nearly a month now just trying to be able to get from zone 2000 to zone 2200, and I still can’t even get to 2100.

Either I suck completely, or we need moar updates.

The trick for reaching very high levels is EDR (Energized Dark Ritual). You can increase your damage by 10% every 30 minutes. That adds up.

You can probably reach 2100ish without any dark rituals, if you have enough in bhaal / frag / jugg. That means you need 500 levels worth of EDR to reach 2600. HP doubles every 5 levels, so the 2600 boss has 2^100 times as much health as the level 2100 boss. To get a 2^100 damage multiplier you need 100 * log(2) / log(1.1) = 727 EDRs.

In theory you can get 48 of them each day, so getting 727 should take a bit over 15 days. More realistically it will probably take around 2 months (that is, 2 months AFTER you have collected enough souls to reach 2000ish comfortably). Those 2 months though you don’t really need to be very active. No need for ascending, no need for using skills other than the EDR combo, no need for clicking. Entirely possible without cheating, it just takes a lot of time.

You are still wrong huntard. But from what I’ve seen on you on this forum, that never seems to stop you, does it?

Anyway. I tried the bonus mission with just 4 rare towers: Mortar, Air Guard, Prime Injector and Detector. I reach 206 waves, 200 cards. And I probably could have gotten further if I designed my setup a bit better and hadn’t rushed too much near the end. So clearly getting 20 cards is entirely possible without any unique cards.

I have now gotten every single tower in the game from these missions at least once. And that is in just 5 tries. It is very clear that this mission is by far the best way to spend stars. It can give every single card. It gives a lot of unique towers, and while it’s slightly skewed towards the more common uniques, it can give every single one.

the fact that I’ve irrevocably screwed myself by upgrading my towers “the wrong way” and by playing too many story missions… I don’t know why games do this. In order to play the game “right” I’d have to start over, which spoils any sense of progress.

This is the glaring and critical hallmark of a Bad Game. Any game where you can make forward progress and be irredeemably punished for it is very poorly designed. (We get enough of that in real life, thank you.) It’s too bad, because the premise and graphics are so good, but they totally borked this aspect and seem uninterested in fixing it.

While I agree that is is poor design, it should be noted that the difference in damage between a bad T3 and a good T3 is only 2.8%. Not that much. And it’s not very hard to get the cards again, if you already have bad T3s you should be able to all the missions pretty easily to get new cards.

I’m not sure which 4 out of 9 you are talking about. Dragon Tower, Lightning Tower, Tower of the Sun, Ice Tower, Sharp-shooter, Prime Gun and Energy Cannon are all very much worth it. Spray Gun I don’t know, I don’t know its upgraded stats, and haven’t tried it either. Toxic Tower is of course utterly worthless, but I believe it is the only worthless tower of the uniques. So 7 or 8 out of 9 are good, depending on how to rate Spray Gun.

Regardless of that, or even if you only want one specific unique, the mission is still worth it. The ordinary version of the bonus mission gives you 1 shot at cards every 50 waves. But these cards are much less good, the chance of getting an unique from these is very small, even with 3 tries. The chance of getting an unique from the 15 star bonus mission seem to be in the area of 25%, with over half of them towers. So much better odds.

But you shouldn’t compare it with the ordinary non-paid version of the mission. You should compare it with buying unique packs with stars. Because the question is “what do I spend my stars on”. And the answer is that this mission is much better than buying cards in the shop.

You yourself spent 200 stars on unique cards and got 10 towers. I got 14 towers for 50 stars. That is 460% more towers. What’s more you only got the most common towers, while I got a much better spread.

I have no idea what you are talking about soul4hdwn. Both the numbers I gave were for maximum level T3.5 towers. With all talents unlocked. And yes, for towers that haven’t been upgraded in-battle. Upgrading them in battle just straight up doubles the damage (and then doubles it again), so that does not change the comparison.

The point is that a mortar does 25% more damage than an energy cannon. But a mortar has only 40% AoE and an energy cannon has full AoE. Also, an energy cannon is only 56% of the cost. So overall it’s a better tower.

I’ve been collecting data on the limited time bonus mission, the one that costs 15 stars to compete in.

First off, I always seem to be able to get between 210 and 220 waves no matter what strategy I try. It’s difficulty scales really steeply after 200 waves. With just a mortar + air guard, and some support, you should be able to easily reach 200 waves. With just a dragon tower too.

I’ve done the mission 4 times now. Each time I got 21 cards. These are the results:

Doing the 15 star bonus mission seems to be much better, if you have good towers already so you can get quite some waves. With just dragon tower you can easily reach 200 waves. Last try I got to 220 waves, 22 cards. This gave me 3 unique towers (sharpshooter, prime gun, toxic), 3 unique spells (2x rain of fire, thunderbolt), 6 stars and a shitton of gold. So bottom line 3 towers for 9 stars, plus lots of gold. Not bad at all.

Even with just rare towers reaching 150 waves should be easy, and 200 probably possible. Still much better than buying unique cards for stars directly.

Ancient Seal and Spell Amplifier are very useful, but obviously not worth 7 stars. They are worth about 600-700 silver each (2000 silver nets you 1 of each plus blessed hammer and ice emblem). Unique spells are nice, but you only ever need one of them. So the only thing you really want are unique towers.

Of course you don’t expect every buy to be good. But getting towers only 1/3 and then only the ones worth least is a bit of a bummer. For 200 stars I’d want at least some of the rare unique towers.

Nope. Evolving and fusing are entirely decoupled mechanics. Combine a level 11 with a level 5 and you just get a level 11.

And for your damage it doesn’t matter whether you level your tower up first, or fuse it first. The only way you can go wrong is by fusing a tier 2 tower with a tier 1 tower to make an imperfect tier 3. As long as you avoid that, there is no way you can go wrong.

As for prime injector: The bonus at Tier3 level 15 goes up to 23.8%. So you need 5 towers in range before it becomes beneficial. That’s doable, but on most levels you won’t get many more, so it won’t add too much to your power. So I wouldn’t prioritize it, but if you have everything else then it’s worth it.

2.3 Con Artist reserves the right to access, modify and delete your account as we see fit. Users suspected or discovered to be in violation of any of the terms outlined in this agreement can expect to have their accounts suspended, deleted or modified. CONARTISTMAYSUSPEND, TERMINATE, MODIFY, OR DELETEANYACCOUNT, USER OR PLAYER AT ANYTIMEFORANYREASON OR FOR NO REASON, WITH OR WITHOUTNOTICE TO YOU. Failure to comply with the terms listed in Section 2.2 may result in termination or suspension of your Account as a whole or with the communication aspects of the Account. -TLS DZ terms of service.

You cant sue them cause every time you play you agree to this and they can ban you for no reason at all. And I am sure they had a reason to ban you though.

Just because they put that in their terms of service, doesn’t make it legal. It depends a bit on your jurisdiction, but in general such stipulations are legally void, because customer protection laws supercede them.

Not that suing them will accomplish anything. Certainly not in the OPs case, where the ban was obviously justified.

Since this morning I can’t log on anymore. Game starts, and goes through most of the loading phase, but then hangs forever while it says “server initialization complete” until I eventually get a timeout error.

Sounds like alot of butthurt players have the inability to determine razor pinion was op. Overlooked because of the four delay the card has, and ya wonder why the burst box promo was such limited time. Every card has a counter. I suggest building decks to counter pinion if that’s what u have trouble beating.

That would be fair (albeit offensively phrased) criticism if this was the original tyrant, where you can easily swap decks.

You can’t easily swap decks in this game. You mostly pick a faction and stick with it. Sure I could buy the newest bestest righteous cards, but they won’t fit in my deck, so they aren’t much use to me. I suppose I could spend 8000 dollars on buying 10 of them, and another 3000 dollars on salvage coins to level them, but that is a bit more than I am willing to spend on this game.

Switching your deck probably takes about half a year for the average player. It can be done, but only in the most dire of circumstances.

And besides, is that a good solution? Having everybody in the game play RT and abandoning all other factions? Seems a bit boring.

In an ideal system every card has a counter. This is not an ideal system.

Also, not every counter is equally cheap. If the only counter to a free deck is a several thousand dollar whale deck, that is a problem. And not every counter is equally good. The counter card still needs to be decent all around, otherwise it is dead weight most of the time.

I’m so tired of the state of the game right now. Righteous decks are so much stronger than any other type of deck it just isn’t funny anymore.

You can see this when you pvp. Almost all the top decks are RT. The top guild, CrazyDiamond, is almost entirely righteous. The current brawl, I face righteous decks about 9/10, and even the decks that do not have Constantine as a commander generally have several RT cards. It’s just ridiculous.

The reasons for this are pretty obvious. Of the free cards, Zodiac Harbringer is simply better than any other card by a huge margin. The second best free card is probably Noble Defiance, another righteous card. The best card in the game if of course Tempest Citadel, another RT card. This particular card works for all factions, but it synergizes best with RT decks that are already heavy on armor / protect. Then there is Bolt Crag, an old beast but probably still the 2nd best epic (yellow) card in the game. Righteous have a whole row of very strong legendary cards as well.

Other factions just can’t compete. Well, sure, if you are willing to shell out $10,000 for a deck with several vindicator then the other factions can compete. For the most expensive decks out there the other factions have some truly sick choices as well.

For free players RT is simply the best faction by a huge margin. For freemium players, who only pay a bit, RT is also the best faction by a huge margin. And for the smaller whales, RT is again the best faction by a huge margin.

To add insult to injury most of the recent battlefield effects have been hugely beneficial to RT. Last war with the rally effect was basically designed to make sure no deck could even come close to competing with ZH spam. Fortresses also help mainly Imperial and Righteous, since they benefit builder-decks over very aggressive decks that BT and Raider, and to a lesser extend Xeno, tend to have.

Especially raider and BT are in a very sorry state. The only semi-decent raider cards with pierce suffer from low health, and no evade or armor. In the current meta raider just doesn’t work anymore. A card like Charincinerator is almost entirely outdated. It’s counter and poison do almost nothing thanks to all the protect floating around. And as for BT, well, they have never been playable I fear.

Do something about this. Give the other factions a free card on par with ZH, or a epic box card on par with Bolt.

One very annoying thing though is that on missions it’s often very hard to find all searchable containers on the map. Their hitboxes are sometimes very small, and often near the end of the mission I still miss a couple, and have to manually mouse over almost every pixel of the map in the hopes of finding the missing few.

Is there an easier way to finding these things?

And if not, could it be added? Something like a keyboard shortcut to highlight all searchable containers on the map.

We all know the problems, we all know how to solve them (or at least most of them). There have been dozens of threads about this. The devs are aware of this as well, they do read the forums occasionally. Heck, one of the devs replied to this very thread. Awareness is not the problem.

Nor are these problems particularly difficult to fix. Some require barely no effort at all. The devs clearly don’t want to put a lot of effort in this game, but they do put in some effort still. Fixing wars is well within the scope of the limited effort they want to put into this game.

But they still won’t do it. Because while wars are clearly broken for us, they are perfect FORTHEM.

The devs primary interest is not in making a good game. It’s in making a game that will make us, the players, keep playing, and above all keep paying. Making an enjoyable game is one way to do this, but unfortunately for us, making the game as frustrating as possible is an even better way.

In fact I think Eclipse fought and beat every other guild in the top15 except our brothers and sisters from Umbra and Apogee.

We beat Overload 3 to 1
We scored 1 – 1 against Crazy Diamond
Every other guild we best easily (though Russia made a very impressive last minute rush attempt in one of our wars).

I think both OL and CD may have slightly better decks on average. Certainly they have more expensive decks. But we have amazing team spirit and coordination. Plus very skilled officers. That just pays of.

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